New CIA Director

2004-07-12

Category:politics

As many of you know, we need a new CIA chief. The old one meandered off and hasn't been heard from since, or something like that anyway. Regardless of what happened, we need a new one. There's been talk among the politicians about when to pick one. Some say we should wait till after November's elections. Others say we should do it sooner. I agree with the latter, for good reason.

One of the big problems with setting an arbitrary date is that it is just that, arbitrary. There's a reason we refer to it as "Pulling it out of one's butt". When we do things we should try to use reason. If we are picking a chief spy then we should know the reasons why. The date associated with that decision should follow logically from our reasoning. Any other date picking procedure is stupid.

Maybe we want to save the salary that we would be paying to a CIA director. I've known of businesses that would forego hiring just to save on salary and benefits expenses. The other employees always hate it because they have to fill in without pay. The job gets done poorly, which increases costs. The savings are almost never worth the hassle.

Sure, we could argue that the CIA Poo-Bah needs to get along with the president and there is always the chance we'll have a different president before too long. We could try to use that as an excuse to postpone the selection. It brings up my "stupid" comment from earlier.

I want the person running the Central Intelligence Agency to be the most competent person for the job regardless of who is president. The CIA has an important job to do. They see to our safety. Provided they follow the laws, I want them to work the same no matter who sits in the Oval Office.

Ask any American spy and he or she will tell you, "You've got me mistaken for someone else. I'm just a convenience store clerk," or possibly, "No habla." I'm pretty sure that's just code for "we need a director".

Wait a minute. That kind of worries me too. If we have rules to define how the spies are supposed to do there work and we have the same spies and enemies, shouldn't they keep running smoothly even without a director? Hmm, maybe they can run for a while without a new person in charge.

Anyway, for replacement purposes, we need a really good reason to postpone. We should replace the director soon otherwise we'll have to outsource the position to India.